The Kyocera Hydro Life is an inexpensive phone for the accident-prone, but you give up a lot in terms of performance to meet this price point.

Very inexpensive and somewhat durable, the waterproof Kyocera Hydro Life would make a decent first smartphonefor a tween. With its retail price now below $100 off contract, it's one of the cheapest ways to get online and dip into the deep pool of Android apps. But subpar earpiece quality and a lack of LTE mean that I can't enthusiastically recommend it.

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Physical Features, Call Quality, and NetworkingFor a $100 phone, the Hydro Life feels solid. It measures 5.19 by 2.57 by 0.43 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.8 ounces; it fits comfortably into smaller hands, so it'll be suitable for kids or small-pawed adults.

The back is textured plastic, a little bit of rubber at the top and bottom say "durable," and the chrome edge is a fine touch at this price. The Hydro Life is rated for 30 minutes of water resistance at 3 feet. After a 30-minute dunking, we found that the screen suffered from ghost touches, but a reboot fixed that. This could be a huge benefit for people who tend to drop or dunk their phones.

The screen is one of the nicest things about this phone. The 4.5-inch, 960-by-640 IPS LCD is bright, with rich colors, and is decently visible outdoors. Not all 960-by-640 panels are the same; the Alcatel One Touch Fierce 2's screen, for instance, is dim compared with this one.

The Hydro Life uses Kyocera's "smart sonic receiver," which vibrates the whole screen to make sound rather than pumping it through a little earpiece. That's an interesting tactic, but I've found it disappointing all around; sound through the not-earpiece is too quiet for my taste, and a bit tinny. The back-ported speakerphone is deep and much heartier, although I kept wanting to turn the phone around so it faced me. Transmissions through the main microphone have real trouble being heard in noisy areas, but sound much better coming from the speakerphone, oddly enough. The phone supports both T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling and HD Voice.

Like all of T-Mobile's $100 phones except the Nokia Lumia 635, the Hydro Life lacks LTE. That makes me really hesitant, as T-Mobile is pouring investment into its LTE network right now, and owners of all of these phones won't see any of the coverage and quality improvements in the works. The phone is also stuck at HSPA+ 21, not even HSPA+ 42, so the download speeds we saw were around 3-5Mbps. The Hydro Edge also supports quad-band GSM for (slow) global roaming and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, albeit only on the crowded 2.4GHz band. GPS and Bluetooth 4.0 LE are also on board, as usual.

Application Performance and MultimediaThe Hydro Life runs Android 4.3 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor at 1.2GHz, scoring pretty much the same on benchmarks as all the other similar phones with this processor and screen resolution. The Life is unlikely to ever get an upgrade to Android 4.4—much less Lollipop—and if that's a concern for you, the $119.99 Moto E is your pick in this price range.

Kyocera added a slightly confusing custom lock screen and a few widgets to Android, but the company's skin isn't that heavy. There's a utility called MaxiMZR which extends battery life by restricting data usage in the background, and a large font mode. Medium-strength games like Asphalt Overdrive played fine on this phone.

The Hydro Life makes a good music phone; the back-ported speaker is surprisingly non-tinny, and the phone feeds a relatively strong amount of bass into headphones. For video, the Hydro Life will play 1080p MP4 videos, but to play any other format you'll need to use third-party players. Netflix, of course, runs just fine over Wi-Fi, but you can't run it well over the 3G network.

Low-end phones like this tend to have very little available storage for apps and media. The Hydro Life has more than most—3.53GB for your apps, which precludes downloading huge games, but is better than some of the direct competitors like the Moto E and Alcatel One Touch Fierce 2. You can put a microSD card in a slot under the back for photos, but don't get a card bigger than 32GB, as 64GB cards don't work here.

The Hydro Life's still camera is decent in good light, falling to poor in low light. The 5-megapixel main camera takes decent if occasionally pinkish photos, and 720p videos at 25 frames per second. In low light, the image noise ramps up pretty quickly as the light comes down, but at least the camera holds off on being blurry for a while. The front camera seems impressive at 2 megapixels, but low-light images are greenish and noisy, and 720p videos only record at 15 frames per second; VGA videos are the way to go here.

ConclusionsThe low end of T-Mobile's line is festooned with a bunch of very similar Snapdragon 400-powered smartphones. There's this one, the Alcatel One Touch Fierce 2, the LG Optimus L90 (which we haven't reviewed), and the Nokia Lumia 635, for instance. The Hydro Life gets points for being durable, although if that's not a concern for you, the L90 will probably have better overall performance. I'm rating this slightly lower than the Lumia 635 because of the lack of LTE, which I consider to be a critical feature if you want the best T-Mobile network performance in 2015.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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